...Alexis Soloski In this forum, critic Alexis Soloski gathers a range of contemporary theater artists, with an array of approaches to fact-based performance, to discuss the potential, integrity, and complications of documentary theater. © 2013 by Alexis Soloski 2013 Unnatural Acts, Classic...

... places the pieces into four distinct categories—reenactment, recollection, reactment, and reclassification—each of which allows for a kind of questioning of and engagement with history and the present. Milo Rau International Institute of Political Murder ( iipm ) ntg ent documentary theater...

... operations. Satter stages the fbi transcript verbatim, consciously shifting what we have come to expect from documentary the- ater. Peter Weiss, a postwar theorist of documentary drama, defines the form: The documentary theater shuns all inventions. It makes use of authentic documentary mate- rial, which...

...Jonathan Kalb © 2001 by Yale School of Drama/Yale Repertory Theatre 2001 Theater 31.3-03 Kalb.sh 10/16/01 10:57 AM Page 12 Theater 31.3-03 Kalb.sh 10/16/01 10:57 AM Page 13 Jonathan Kalb Documentary Solo Performance...

... creation/documentary (the prominent mode of popular theater) “authenticates experi- ence rather than ideology or polemical inquiry . . . does not try to explain the significance of the matter it documents in an intellectual scheme, but rather suggests the significance...

... troupes. At approximately the same time, Erwin Piscator, together with collaborators, was also developing in Germany a type of documentary theater that was collectively created, culminating in 1925 with the creation of In Spite of Everything, the first play actually called a documen- tary. Just...

... of their ambiguities—soaked in the aesthetics of folklore, kitsch, and spectacle. Tompa suggests that “less hierarchical forms of performance, such as postdramatic theater” hold the potential to upset these dominant single narratives with multiviewpoint art, including “forum theater, reenactment, and documentary plays...

... in documentary theater and performance spaces in and around Members of the specializing in economic and industrial Los Angeles in the spring of 1989. Theater Worker’s issues, has been recognized for her work...

... at the annual theater festival in Alexandria where a Ger- man curator gave a lecture about German documentary theater, and my brain literally exploded. Certainly I had grown up with aunts and aunties who were storytellers and who could channel all the characters in my father s village. By age ten or so, I...

... work in this creation involves the determination of speaker and sequence. But clearly this is a radical reversal of conventional ideas of playwriting. As playwright, Copper does not mastermind a fictitious world, nor does she simply “document” a nonfictional reality as documentary theater might...

... for making devised and documentary theater work grow, are theater makers embracing the idea of the curator out of sheer aspiration —  or even out of convenience or cynicism? The very word curator conjures glitzy biennials and well-­capitalized art galleries, foreshadowing initiatives that might...

... to place herself in the tradition of documentary theater, where both fiction and representation, her inseparable partner, are expelled from the stage. Everything presented comes directly from the world, and any fictionalization is produced only because of the nature of the stage, a frame that contains...

... s plays and thus show an authenticity beyond acting. Clearly, for Rau the time of bourgeois entertain- ment theater is past and the traditional documentary or dialectical theater needs to be revised. And obviously, he rejects the common aestheticization of documentary sources. He even distances...

... of the traditional stages did not exist here and based on concrete facts. However, as opposed to a type of there was, instead, the ever-pressing need to keep the audience in- “documentary theater“ (Peter Weiss), they sought to bring out the terested and entertained. The actor had to become mime, singer...

..., and the practicing dramatist as well as the academic or the individual spectator is profoundly implicated in their discourses. The death of the author; the maker of “documentary” theater; the composition of a playscript or promptbook from “found text” and the means by which...

...). for its production of the Fair. Its second OBIE came in 1976 for Contact was made with ITUCH (Instituto de la Universidad “Chile, Chile!” a documentary theater piece directed by Joseph de Chile), Chile’s leading repertory company, which had planned Chaikin. The 1975-76 season was marked...

... years. Described as a “documentary for five screens” in the program for the Public Theater’s Under the Radar Festival,2 where Bonanza appeared in Janu- ary 2011, the piece chronicles the lives of the small handful of permanent residents in Bonanza, Colorado, a nineteenth-­century gold-­rush...

... not for the purpose of creating small stands and carts hawk curries and drama and the “action” commences documentary theater, Cixous imagines sweets for the less abstract nourish- within the compelling luminiscence of the crucial period (1937-1948) in In- ment of the body and senses. Already white-washed walls...

..., with its central focus on character-driven conflicts, had clearly always been capable of responding to those limits inherent to its situational form. Natural- ism, the epic form, documentary theater, and many other dramaturgical advances rep- resented new dramatic forms. The claims of postdramatic...

... of the consciously created emotional form. 14 In the condensation of the theatrical-a­ rtificial context, this is as imaginary as it is real.15 This clearly removes Rau from the documentary theater of Lola Arias or Christiane Mudras and is at times more reminiscent of Schiller, Georg Büchner, or Rolf Hochhuth...